Author: Judith Fetterley

November 15, 2022

 Smart Plants, Aging Gardener

I recently watched a webinar entitled “Smart Plants – magical interactions between flowers and their pollinators” and I realized I know nothing. I make no claims to botanical expertise. I didn’t expect to be up on the many and incredible ways flowers get the job done. But I did think I knew plants.

I was wrong. Turns out, that globally speaking, my plant base is miniscule. I know nothing of Strongylodon, the outrageously colorful jade vine; of Physoplexis, the tufted horned rampion; of Crinodendron hookerianum, the Chilean lantern tree, or of Polygala, aka “milkwort.”

Of course I would not find these plants at Faddegon’s or Gades, my favorite local nurseries. But that is not the point. Watching the presenter toss off the names of so many plants I know nothing about, I realized that even within my own zone, there are hundreds of plants I do not know. I started late and, like my college boyfriend who took up the violin in his twenties, I am confronted by reality. Had I another lifetime to arrange, I would apprentice at ten to a Master Gardener and get a job in a nursery as soon as they would hire me. Then I might know something.

Unfortunately, I followed watching the “Smart Plants” video by picking up the latest issue of Horticulture. Here I read an interview with Claudia West, described as “a planting designer who looks to natural plant communities to inform and inspire her work, which combines evocative beauty and real ecological functions.”  And I realized that both my second profession as “garden designer”  rather than “planting designer” and my garden, whose ecological function is admittedly low, are out of touch with what is needed when you are Planting in a Post Wild World, the title of West’s co-authored 2015 book.

The trouble is I agree with West when she describes our current condition as one of “mass extinction, warming climate, global urbanization and socio-environmental injustice.” And I accept her dictum that “In the context of these realities, planting can no longer just be ornamental decoration.” It must instead serve the goal of rebuilding abundance and ecological function while offering people meaningful opportunities to connect with plants.

I can’t replant my own bit of ground at this point in my life, nor can I re-start my second profession and become a Claudia West disciple. What I can do, however, is promote her basic principles through writing and speaking. So here they are.

Community: plants are social beings, not isolated art objects. West applies the “core principles of natural plant communities” to all her designs. This means no bare earth, no single beauty set off in mulched circles, but rather every nook and cranny filled with plants that work together in designs that shout lushness and abundance. West notes that to make these designs work, she and her colleagues must “constantly expand our understanding of every plant’s behavior, longevity, competitiveness and strategy of self-proliferation.”  [so much to know]

Ecological function: there are dozens of species and cultivars of Echinacea, for example, many of which, West points out, are “garden worthy and gorgeous.” “But,” she adds, “when I look at the ecological value of these there are differences between cultivars and even species” in terms of their value for pollinators.  [there goes two of my basic garden design principles]

Design: people determine so much of what happens to plants. Humans cannot be left out of the calculation if “planting designers” want to re-store the planet. So plantings must appeal to the public. West points out that “in a world where plant-blindness is widespread, turning up the visual volume of planting is the key. Our toolbox is full of effective design strategies that showcase the best qualities of ecological plants and create deeply emotional, immersive nature experiences for people.”   [well, at least as a garden designer I tried to emphasize the psychological experiences for humans of interactions with plants]

West is emphatic in reminding us that “planting design is not just an art. Planting is also a science-based profession rooted in the evolutionary history of plants and their ecosystems. Acknowledging this reality is the only path to developing resilient plantings that require less human life support.” It is not enough to have simply an eye for color and texture and habit and how plants play together.

Oh, to be ten again and poised to participate in this revolution. Oh, to be young enough to choose the path that leads to the profession of “planting designer.”  To be able to toss out the ideas of “garden worthy” and “gorgeous” and to embrace the concepts of ecological function and plant communities. To be that kind of smart.

This year, for the first time, I have felt some consequences of the aging process. Gall bladder surgery, a recurring problem with my right hip and left leg, an ear that feels constantly full of water have plagued me this summer and fall. On our recent visit to D.C. both Sara and I agreed that next time we will “uber” it rather than walk the long blocks that, this trip, separated our hotel from the various museums we wanted to see and left us only wanting to sit and drink.

I am grateful that it has taken this long for aging to seriously set in, and I intend to do everything I can to get more function back, but reality is reality. I am not going to get to be a “planting designer.”

Still West has encouraging words for the home, and older, gardener who may not be able to participate in the revolution. “Buy more plants,” she exhorts, laughing but also quite serious. Those of us with established gardens can help restore the planet simply by filling the gaps in our gardens with “beautiful, productive plants. Just layering more plants into your existing garden alone will create more abundant planting with higher ecological value.” And she adds that “in the face of climate doom and an avalanche of new pests and diseases, nurturing an abundant garden proves that, although things will change, life will go on.”

I gladly embrace the directive to “buy more plants” and to prove through my garden that life will go on no matter what damage we humans do to the planet. I am filling in the gaps, incorporating natives, and reducing the lawn. But, in the last analysis, I am still a garden designer, hooked on “garden worthy and gorgeous.”  At least I know something about that.

November 1, 2022

The Garden is Down

November 1. The beginning of a different season. The garden is down.

Yes, of course, it is down but not done. I will need to rake when the sweetgum, the Callery pear, and the paperbark maples finally decide to undergo abscission. They are very late to drop their leaves this year. And, of course, I left up some late bloomers, including annuals, that I couldn’t bear to cut down “just yet.”  The house sparrows are back in the deck awning and the tools will need to be cleaned and sharpened.

The bulk of the job is done, though. Kevin and I put in a long day this past Friday and a short morning on Saturday and concluded our season together. A beautiful season, we both agreed, as Sara joined us on the deck for our ritual coffee and gluten free chocolate pumpkin muffins. So much laughter, so much sharing, such good conversations. A gift, indeed, a blessing.

But the garden is down, the season effectively ended. A good time, perhaps, to reflect on what it all means.

A gardening friend once pointed out how unlikely gardeners are to brag. Have you ever heard a gardener say they are good at gardening? A gardener might invite you to stop by to see their daylilies in bloom but, if you should accept the invitation, you are more likely to get an apology for the weeds that haven’t been pulled or the plant that is flopping over than you are to hear of how successfully the gardener has achieved a desired effect .

We gardeners tend to focus on our failures, but our failures don’t ever seem to stop us from continuing to garden.

Why?

Well, here are a few things to consider.

Gardening gives us a chance to look closely and often, to attend to detail, to notice the pattern on the bloom of a blackberry lily or the texture of a birch leaf. It is impossible to be out in the garden without being stopped at every turn by something worth taking note of, be it a Geum still blooming in November or a snow drop pushing up through the March snow.

Gardening requires us to focus. Gardening works better than yoga to control my “monkey mind.” If I am trying to eradicate the hated bittersweet from my garden, I need to focus on precisely which of the many green shoots before me has the feared orange root. I do not want to pull out witchhazel sprouts by mistake. And if I do not focus on precisely where I need to insert my weeder to dig out the bittersweet shoot, I can easily slice open my finger. “Attention must be paid” makes more sense in the garden than in the play.

Gardening keeps us active. We gardeners, I say to those who ask, are athletes, even if we don’t train as we should. We use our bodies constantly and we use them hard. We bend, we lift, we dig, we yank. We scramble under shrubs to cut off low branches or get out wet dead leaves. We stretch high to prune a crossing branch on our favorite Japanese maple. We bend to weed and kneel to plant. We move wheelbarrows loaded with compost or mulch and pitchfork the contents onto garden beds. We drag bags of yard trash to the side of the road. Our exercise may not be aerobic but it is constant and varied.

Unlike most of my neighbors who connect with each through dogs and children, I don’t have a dog or a child.  I do have a garden, though, and it connects me. I share plants with Nancy next door and information with a neighbor passing by who asks about my dwarf reblooming lilac. I enjoy a chat about organic lawn care as a neighbor asks about my latest attempt to fix my lawn and as I scratch behind the ears of a favorite dog.

At the end of our day of taking down the garden, I said to Kevin, “I don’t know how I will get through dark times ahead when I can’t be out in my garden.”

By which I meant to say that out in the garden, I am absorbed by what is happening here and now, in front of me, and not about the dark possibilities ahead.

By which I meant to say that in the garden, despite disease and pests, failures and frustrations, I am focused on the positive, the good, what enriches my soul and keeps me hopeful. Out in the garden I feel surrounded by beauty and complexity that feed my soul.

By which I meant to say that in the garden I get to witness growth and change, possibility and potential. Sometimes those changes take place so quickly that we miss them. More often, gardening presents as the slowest of the performing arts, and in so doing teaches us patience, for there is no point in hurrying a plant even if we could.

By which I meant to say that my garden keeps me in touch with the patterns of light and temperature that produce growth and decline. It alerts me to the rhythms of a world larger, more ancient, and far more important than myself. It gives me perspective.
And so I celebrate the solstice and equinoxes because it helps me keep this perspective.

By which I meant to say that out in the garden I am gathered, focused, at one with myself and the work. And so at peace.

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October 11, 2022

My Mother’s Gardens

My mother gardened against the odds. In Canada our house faced north. “This,” my mother said, “is good for painting but bad for gardening.”  At the time she imparted this wisdom, I did not appreciate it; much later I learned the truth the hard way. She grew hot red salvia and bright orange marigolds along the walkway to the front of our house to counter the effects of the cold northern light. I loved coming home from school to these colors.

In Indiana, my mother faced poor soil, bad weather, and vigorous pests. My father, no gardener himself but definitely a helpful man, dragged bag after bag of manure and lime to her gardens each season in an effort to improve the soil, to little apparent effect. Still, she persisted.

We had no garden center in Franklin, so my mother purchased plants from catalogues and had the nurseries ship them to her. Each spring would witness the arrival of new additions, and each summer would witness her disappointments. Smitten by its description in the Wayside Garden catalogue, she once bought a Potentilla. According to the Wayside catalogue, this plant is “Hardy to zone 2, adaptable to poor soils,” and “is covered with masses of bright yellow flowers from May to October and is easy to grow. Can be placed almost anywhere in the sun successfully.”

Our Franklin house faced east, providing southern light on the side where my mother placed the Potentilla. No bloom, however, could she coax from this plant save the occasional pale-yellow short-lived pop. In a fit of pique she gave it to our neighbor who planted it on the northern side of his house, where it proceeded to bloom profusely. “He has such a green thumb,” cried my mother, “and he must have better soil.”

When my mother threw down the trowel on the Potentilla, however, she acted uncharacteristically, for she was a veritable Churchill in the garden. From her, not him, I learned never to surrender. Each year my dad would buy her a rose bush for Mother’s Day, and each season we watched as black spot, powdery mildew, rust, cankers and galls attacked that new plant and all the old ones too. Yet never ever did it occur to my mother to give up trying to grow roses. No matter the defeats she experienced, she kept on, convinced that this year she would realize the promise of the catalogues.

Poor soil, bad light, black spot and powdery mildew challenged my mother, but against her true enemies – the weather and the slugs – she was powerless. If there was a dark force in my mother’s universe it was the midwestern wind, coming out of the west, tearing across the garden, destroying her beloved plants. When she realized – from the change of light, a drop in the temperature, a peculiar greenish-yellow cast to the sky – that a storm was about to descend, she would tear off her apron and race out to “tie up the peonies” or “cover the lilies” or “stake the delphiniums” against her mortal foe. As the storm broke, my genteel mother would curse as she watched her beauties lashed and torn by the wind.

When days were fair, however, the slugs would come and gorge themselves on her favorites. Though my mother purchased every remedy she could find in store or catalogue, none stopped the carnage. And so she resorted to the humble saltshaker. After a gentle rain, the kind a gardener prays for, she would go out and subject every slug she could find to a ghastly death of desiccation. Though kind-hearted, my mother would return from her campaign of slaughter, deeply satisfied.

In all the houses of my childhood, my mother hung a photo of the cottage in Ireland where her father had been born and raised, and which he left, according to family lore, at the age of ten. His father had come to Ireland from Oxford, England, to be the gamekeeper on the estate of an absentee English landlord. My mother once asked her father, “How did you as Protestants get along so well in Catholic Ireland?”  “Ah,” he said, “the priest liked my mother.”

In this photo, which today hangs in my living room, two stone benches face each other in the arched and covered entryway to the cottage. In my imagination, I place my great-grandmother on one of these benches and the local priest, whom I envision as young and rather attractive, on the other. Though the photo was taken when the trees were leafless, in my fantasy it is a summer afternoon. They sit across from each other, talking. Perhaps my great-grandmother has fixed tea and cakes for him and perhaps he is regaling her with parish gossip. I am convinced they share a love for plants, for in this photo I see a garden, albeit one that is dormant. The cottage is covered in vines, shrubs sit in front of it, and trees, both conifer and deciduous, surround it. Paths that might lead to other gardens appear on both sides.

I have never been to the Carew estate in County Wexford, I never knew my great-grandmother, but I believe she was a gardener. And I believe that my grandfather, who I later discovered left Ireland at fourteen, not ten as family lore would have it, kept alive his love for his mother through gardening. For my grandfather was a gardener. The moment he got home from the grocery store which he owned and ran, he would go out to the garden.

“I would ask my mother, ‘Where is Dad?’” my mother remembered, “and she would answer, ‘Out in the garden, dear, staking delphiniums.’”

My mother worshipped her father, and her love of gardening came from him and kept him present for her. I loved my mother and my memories of her come filled with memories of her gardens. But I have no memories of learning to garden from her. I remember only being given the job of clearing out and cleaning up the long untended gardens at the house my parents bought two years after moving to Franklin. My brother and I weeded out endless Rose of Sharon seedlings from along the back fence and spent hours pulling up what turned out to be poison ivy from around the fishpond. But I did not help her plant the gardens she created in the spaces we cleared, nor did I help her to maintain them. I did not weed or deadhead or prune or stake or pore over catalogues with her.

Why?  Did I seem uninterested?  Was I uninterested? Did she think I was too busy with my own burgeoning life?  Was I too busy?  Was the garden her own special project, the place where she got to be Mary, not Mom?  Was my energy not good for her garden? Because I too have learned that you must be careful who you invite into your garden.

Still, from my mother I learned that gardening can be difficult, frustrating, full of grief and things you can’t control, but also a way of being in the world so deeply rooted that you would not, indeed could not, give it up.

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September 28, 2022

Fig Tree

I have been thinking a lot about fig trees lately. This time of year, I haunt Lowe’s because it usually has good plants at good prices.  This fall, front and center, Lowe’s is offering fig trees – little ones, but healthy looking and decently priced.  A one-gallon Ficus carica ‘Desert King’ can be yours for a mere $16.98.

I have always wanted a fig tree. When I first learned that the Chicago Botanic Garden had created one (Ficus carica ‘Chicago Hardy’) specifically for northern climates I was thrilled. When I learned that “figs are best grown in USDA zones 8 to 10 in organically rich, moist, well-drained soils in full sun to part shade,” however, I despaired, despite the caveat that “figs may be grown in protected locations in USDA Zones 5 -7.” The Missouri Botanical Garden’s fact sheet also included the following reservation: “plants will usually show significant die back in cold winters.” I gave up my obsession and did not renew it until this past week and the encounter at Lowe’s. At last, I thought, a fig that is hardy to zone 5.

Like many readers of the Gospel of Mark, I have long been puzzled, indeed upset, by the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree for having only leaves even though it was not the season for fruit. He was hungry, it should have had figs?  This doesn’t seem like the Jesus who might well have been a plant lover, one who found comfort from a garden during his long night in Gethsemane. John mentions the fact of a garden at the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial, as if this fact might give the reader comfort as it perhaps gave comfort to Jesus on the cross and to those who buried him. Mary, not his mother but his disciple, Mary Magdalene, the “disappeared” apostle, first takes the risen Jesus for a gardener.

I have always had compassion for the cursed and killed fig tree, just as I have compassion for the trees I see dying from the practice of “volcano” mulching or from poor planting.  Indeed, if I were to curse anything, it would be the industry that sells trees so entangled with girdling roots that their chance of survival once planted is only slightly better than that of a cursed fig. I might also find it possible to curse an industry that lures people into purchasing a plant that will not survive the winter that awaits it.  A closer look at the tag on ‘Desert King’ – the name itself should, I suppose, should have sent up a giant red flag – reveals that it is “non-hardy in zones 1 to 5.”  I could finally satisfy my desire to own a fig tree. I could buy one of the several lovely beckoning plants at Lowe’s and it would be as if I cursed it.

Proud of myself for my second look, I resisted the fig tree, a plant I only want because of its leaves, not its fruit. Instead, I purchased two very expensive Leucothoe fontanesiana ‘Little Flames.’

I had fallen for this plant before. It happened as I was just becoming a serious gardener and during my very first visit to Faddegon’s. Still, a person, not a plant caught my eye as I entered the nursery, already in lust of the possibilities that awaited me. She was striding up and down the rows of shrubs, customers in tow, delivering information and opinions in rapid succession and with great authority. She pointed out significant features of habit, foliage, bark, and bloom as she paused before each plant. She lifted large and heavy pots to show customers the different angles available for siting each choice.

I was mesmerized. I was hooked. I would have followed her anywhere, and I did. When she finally turned to me, I muttered something about wanting an interesting plant to line a stone ledge next to a walkway.

“Here is one of my favorite plants for a low line behind stones and above a path,” she replied, leading me to Leucothoe fontanesiana.

I had in fact noticed and liked this shrub when I saw it in its pot as I trailed after her, but I would have bought anything she recommended just to have a bit of her in my garden. Yes, I wanted those plants, but even more I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be a woman who took long strides and spoke with authority about zones and soils and cultivars. I wanted to be a woman who lifted heavy objects and got dirty and took up space. I wanted to be a woman who could say “low line behind stones.” Remember, this was a long time ago.

I purchased three Leucothoe fontanesiana and went back to the cottage on Warner’s Lake where I was struggling to make a garden in soil that I soon discovered to be heavy clay, full of rocks, and completely unsuited to these beauties. Later, much later, when I became a Master Gardener and had opened my own garden design business, I learned that this shrub “looks attractive in the container at the retail garden center” but “don’t let first impressions hold sway; attention to cultural detail is a must.”  Reading further in Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, I found that Leucothoe fontanesiana “prefers acid, moist, well-drained, organic soil; will not withstand drought or sweeping, drying winds.”  Moreover, it is “fickle in the everyday landscape.”

My plants most certainly did not get the conditions they preferred. The “fickle” creatures succumbed after struggling for two years in poor soil and exposed to sweeping winds.

What, then, was I doing so many years later, so wise to the ways of the nursery industry, spending a small fortune to try this plant once more? No gorgeous woman was showing them off to me. They were not “on sale” and I had already exceeded my budget for plants for the year. Moreover, Leucothoe is not a native and I had vowed to purchase only natives for my garden.  Disappointed by the fig, was I trying to satisfy another lust? To finally get something I had long wanted? Complete a circle? Recapture the young gardener I once was?

The tag clearly stated, “hardy to zone 5.’ I was planting them in a sheltered location. Still, once the beauties were home and in the ground, I decided to check my favorite source for accurate plant information. Here is what the Missouri Botanical Garden has to say about Leucothoe fontanesiana ‘Little Flames’:

“Best grown in rich, evenly moist, well-draining, acidic, humusy loams in part shade. ‘Little Flames’ is hardy in USDA Zones 6-9.”

The choices for cursing now are numerous but the most appropriate recipient would be myself. Though I am not inclined at this moment to do anything more than enjoy the plants and pray for a mild winter, I reserve the right to curse widely and well if, come spring, it appears that my ‘Little Flames,’ so fickle in the everyday landscape, have succumbed to the cold.

August 30, 2022

Those of us who garden in New England – at least those of us of a certain age – have one ear permanently tuned to Robert Frost whose poetry comes up out of the landscape like chicory in August.

Ever since planting Prunella vulgaris in a part of my front lawn that refuses to host anything but crabgrass and plantain I have been thinking of the poem Frost titled “Design.”  The commonest common name for Prunella is heal-all, but it is also called self-heal, woundwort, heart-of-the-earth, carpenter’s herb, brownwort or blue curls. It flourishes in New England by roadsides and in fields, and, as its names implies, it has been used for centuries to treat sore throat, infections, viruses, and a multitude of other ailments.  Whether or not it actually has medicinal properties is, of course, a subject of debate among herbalists and those who call them “quacks.”

I planted the Prunella, along with Thymus citriodorus and Carex Appalachia, in an effort to reclaim a piece of my lawn for the natives and the pollinators, and on the assumption that natives could better handle whatever elements in the soil were keeping anything but plantain and crabgrass from growing there. Of course, I was wrong. Only the thyme lasted. Before Carex and the Prunella expired, however, I moved them to more tolerable conditions and have since watered both back to some semblance of health. As for the front lawn, that’s a story for another day.

How much of my determination to save the Prunella came from Frost’s description of it as “wayside blue and innocent” I do not know. What I do know is that I have spent a good part of the season pondering the “innocence” of plants, and re-reading Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, which proposes that plants are far from innocent, that they indeed have designs and that they use humans to accomplish their designs.

I have spent yet more time pondering the question of “design.”  Here is Frost’s take on the subject in his poem titled “Design.”

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth–
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth– I
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.

The answer to his question, of course, is that no thing is too small to be exempt from the charge of design because we humans are wired to see patterns in everything and to assign meanings to these patterns.  Frost’s “I” could just as easily have found a rare beauty in the combination of spider, flower, and moth, and seen it as evidence of a higher power capable of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. I submit, therefore, that the point of Frost’s poem is choice – we choose how we will see things.

Participating once in the 60’s in one of the then ubiquitous “sensitivity training” workshops, I recall partiipants being asked to name, without thinking, one thing each person associated with their family of origin. Amid the recollections of “pain” and “humiliation” and “loneliness” and “loss,” I burst out with “laughter.”

I grew up with a punster and a humorist and a father who always saw the funny side of things. Among my earliest memories comes the wry smile and lifted eyebrow of my dad as he labelled one of my friends, prone to gossip, “Little Misinformation” or described a situation he couldn’t grasp as “it’s a “misery to me.”

No doubt this early immersion in the joy of laughter has shaped my sense of design. At any rate, I choose to look for the comic rather than the tragic in the events of self and other, or perhaps, more accurately, to wrap the comic around the tragic. Perhaps you could say I choose to exit laughing.

In graduate school, in the same decade as the “sensitivity training” episode, I delved into the works of John Milton, and explored there the proposal that Eve was responsible for all the evils in the world and that Mary was the solution to the “problem” of Eve. One doesn’t laugh at Milton, which is perhaps the “problem” with Milton, though I must admit that, much like Eve by the serpent, I was mesmerized by his voice which spoke to me in an English made lofty by Latin. In some theologies, this is what is meant by the “divine comedy” – Mary, the mother of Christ who redeems men from original sin, by this birth redeeming Eve who brought sin into the world in the first place.

Alas, satire is the only word in my dictionary that fits a direct response to the proposition of “he for God only, she for God in him,” an assertion which grounds Paradise Lost and forms the basis of patriarchy and of “the divine comedy.” My sense of the comic does not include satire, which can be very mean-spirited. For me, the beauty of comedy lies in its providing perspective and doing so with kindness.  So if patriarchy is the act of men ascribing to women all the nasties they can’t accept as part of themselves, then comedy is the act of exposing the trick and inviting men to stop projecting and learn instead to laugh at themselves and their foibles and to embrace women as fellow humans.

The 21st century equivalents of those “sensitivity training” workshops tout the benefits of laughter. Even the esteemed Mayo Clinic has joined the chorus.  In the short term, laughter can, according to the Mayo, stimulate various key organs, activate and relieve one’s stress response, and soothe tension.  Over the long term, laughter can, and I quote:

• Improve your immune system. Negative thoughts manifest into chemical reactions that can affect your body by bringing more stress into your system and decreasing your immunity. By contrast, positive thoughts can actually release neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more-serious illnesses.
• Relieve pain. Laughter may ease pain by causing the body to produce its own natural painkillers.
• Increase personal satisfaction. Laughter can also make it easier to cope with difficult situations. It also helps you connect with other people.
• Improve your mood. Many people experience depression, sometimes due to chronic illnesses. Laughter can help lessen your stress, depression and anxiety and may make you feel happier. It can also improve your self-esteem.

Whoa, this testament from the Mayo should be enough to make even the most serious person sit up, take notice. and look for the joke book. Kind of funny, isn’t it?

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August 3, 2022

“Garden and Gun”

Winston Churchill is reputed to have said there are only two things in life worth doing: war and gardening.

Rebecca Solnit, puzzling over George Orwell’s commitment to gardening in the midst of his war on politically repulsive words and ideas, considers: “If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it.”

Reading Margaret Renkl’s essay “Reading the New South,” I learn that there is a magazine called Garden and Gun, which she describes as “assiduously apolitical” and instead devoted to “sweet-tea-and- moonshine preconceptions” of the South.

Before checking out the Garden and Gun website, I wonder: does the title wish to signal that gardens and guns are as intimately aligned as house and garden in the U.K.’s House and Gardens or homes and gardens in the American Better Homes and Gardens? Is it a refutation of Solnit’s speculation and a gloss on Churchill’s pronouncement?

I go to the internet and type in “garden and gun” and learn that the “Garden and Gun magazine celebrates the modern South and features the best in Southern food, style, travel, music, art, literature, and sporting culture.”

No mention of gardens, interestingly enough. So I probe further.  And learn that the name “comes from a now-defunct Charleston nightclub, popular in the 1970s.”  President and CEO Rebecca Darwin says the name captures the spirit of the magazine. “The ‘garden’ is really a metaphor for the land,” she says, “which is really what’s at the heart of this whole magazine.”

As a gardener, with a strong sense of what is and is not a garden, this seems a bit of a stretch. Still, I can’t help but wonder if, in our current political climate, the “sweet-tea and moonshine” folks once again think a gun is required to defend the “garden.”

Since encountering these various positions on the relation of gardens and guns, I have pondered my own. Not surprisingly, in the past I have found myself aligned with Solnit’s premise and have considered my work as a gardener a form of peace-making.

These days, however, in the garden I feel at war. Indeed, were a gun to be handy and I skilled in using it and were deer to show up for further predation, I might just shoot them. I was only gone for a week, to the Cape and the sea for respite from gall bladder woes and back injuries, but a week was all it took for the four foots to devour every single one of my Hostas, leaving me nothing but clumps of bare stalks, chewed off at the top and stripped of leaves. My only option is to cut them back to the ground and pray for late season refoliation.

But I don’t have a gun and I don’t know how to shoot. And I have no desire to get a gun or learn to shoot. Besides, I am really at war with something far larger and harder to target than Bambi. A week away and the drought and heat have destroyed much of what the creatures left alone.

I have experienced drought in my garden before this season, but I have never experienced one this long-lasting. Combined with unprecedented heat, it is deadly. Today the heat is predicted to reach 100 degrees, a record for my town.  I can’t begin to water enough to keep my plants alive. I look at my Astilbe and I want to weep. And then I am filled with rage and want to kill all those who have caused this climate change and all those who stand in the way of our saving what is left of our planet.

I doubt that the men who wrote the Hebrew bible were gardeners. If they had been gardeners, they would have known that no snake was needed to direct Eve to knowledge of the seven deadly sins.

With her first bloom Eve would have experienced pride. If Adam produced a bigger or better display, she would have experienced envy. Discovering in a remote corner of Eden a crabapple “sport,” a variety that she had not seen before, she would have experienced lust and cried out to the listening snake, “I must have that plant.” Unsatisfied until she had collected an orchard’s worth of “sports,” she would be still greedy for more.

I am fully acquainted with the many forms the seven deadlies take in the garden.

I know lust in the form of a new variety of Geum purchased this year and greed in the form of three adorable native Symphoricarpos (aka Snowberry, Coralberry, Waxberry, Ghostberry – see why you need the Latin name!) shrubs when acquiring just one would have answered perfectly well. I know envy in the form of a new Japanese garden that I do not have but a fellow gardener does.

Pride has been my constant companion, and particularly in August. Keeping a garden looking good in August is a challenge. In the past, hearing others complain of their August gardens looking like “the end of pea-time,” as we used to say in Indiana, I have swelled with pride. Despite the heat and dryness of the average August, my gardens look good in August, and I have happily hosted visits and fund-raisers during this difficult month.

Back from the Cape, I cancelled all invitations to visit my gardens this August. The month has barely begun and already my gardens look worse than the end of pea-time.

Lust, greed, envy, pride – they are my familiars in the garden. But only rarely have I felt wrath. These mornings, however, as I do my three-hour watering stint and try to keep some semblance of order in what is left of my garden, I am angry. I have come to loathe the phrase, “scattered thunderstorms,” and if I could get my hands around the neck of the weatherman who teases me with his “40% chance of rain,” I might close in.  Yes, I think, gardening is a form of war and maybe one that I will lose.

Gardens rarely survive the gardener, but is it possible that the gardener won’t survive the garden?

If it ever rains again, I might, like my plants, calm down, perk up, and go back to being peaceful. Until then, it is “garden and gun” all the way.

July 18, 2022

To Be A Gardener

When I was a young reader, making my way through the fiction section of the Franklin Public Library, I encountered, immediately after consuming all the A and B authors, Joyce Cary. Even at that age I was surprised and delighted to discover a female author on the shelves. Joyce?  Of course the author was a “she.” Did I not have more than one Joyce in my class?  And wasn’t the book called “Herself Surprised,” no doubt autobiographical?  Of course, I soon discovered that Joyce Cary was a man and I filed away the fact that many contemporary women’s names started out as names for men, since, as I later realized, women gain prestige if they sound like they are men while men lose status if they are thought to be women. Today I know no men named “Joyce.”

I read Joyce Cary’s trilogy and though I cannot remember a single detail that would bring it back to mind, I do recall most particularly the title of the second volume, “To Be A Pilgrim.”  The phrase captured my nascent ambition to “be somebody,” as the lingo of the 50’s would have it, despite being “just” a girl.

We had to attend church in Franklin — it was a requirement for social acceptability in the Midwest of that day– so I joined the choir. It made church go faster and besides it was more fun. I loved singing hymns. The title of Cary’s book sounded like the refrain from a hymn, but I knew of no hymn with that title. I had skipped Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in making my way through the B’ — it seemed unbearably dull — so I did not know the origins of the phrase, and, of course, I was neither English nor Anglican. Had I been I would have known the hymn “To Be a Pilgrim” and might even have sung it.

When I finally did read this classic text in preparation for my doctoral exam in English literature of the 17^th century, I was once again inspired to “be somebody” in my profession. My ambition was still against the odds since no woman was part of the faculty preparing me for it.

However, I was lucky enough to enter the profession just as it opened up to women, just in time for me to enter it, and I loved my work. I knew I had to quit, however, when I was no longer willing to tell my students the year I graduated from high school.  Class of ’56?  In the fall of 2003, in the last undergraduate class I was to teach, I wasn’t about to give those students curious about my personal provenance that date.

But what did I want to do next? My dad had quit his job of 36 years to help a friend who owned the Ford franchise in our small Indiana town avoid bankruptcy, but no one had come forward to ask me to help them start a publishing company, or run their flower shop, or work in their hardware store. Nor could I, while doing my academic job, find time to imagine or explore a possible future. Despite the public view of academics as close cousins to welfare defrauders, sitting in our offices popping chocolates, gassing to our colleagues, and occasionally strolling down the hall to chat up the undergrads, I worked pretty much all day every day, except Sunday morning and afternoon, from September until the end of June, nose to the teaching and administrative grindstone.  And in July and August I worked harder still, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, writing to save the world.

So in the summer of 2004 I quit my academic job and began the search for work that would let me, like my dad, have a second career after retirement. I took my cat, Bowden, to a school that trained animals to be therapists. I thought that he would love being a helper and I would love being his handler, taking him on his healing rounds to hospitals and nursing homes. Bowden was not interested, and I learned that cats were hard to train. I explored a volunteer work program at Kripalu, the yoga center in the nearby Berkshires. It required on-site residence but provided access to programs in spiritual development. The spiritual development opportunity was appealing but six months away from home proved daunting. I contacted Earlham College, the Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana, to see what might be involved in getting a degree in Quaker theology. Apparently, summers and winters in residence in Richmond.

I had been taking an occasional course at the Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, a town just east of Poughkeepsie, while still working at the University. I had studied soil science and basic botany and insect pests and diseases. Then, in the fall of 2005, I took a course in garden design. The moment I read my first book on garden design and completed my first design assignment I knew what that second life, that new career, would involve: I would become a garden designer. I would design my own demonstration gardens and I would design gardens for others. In the spring of 2006 I opened Perennial Wisdom, my small perennial garden design business, and became what I called a semi-professional gardener.

If asked a month before I quit the University what I did for my living, I would have answered, “Sentences. I write them, I read them, I help students learn to make them. I play with words.” If asked a year after I completed Garden Design 101 what I did for my living, I would have answered, “Space. I arrange objects in space. I play with texture and color, with plant habit and leaf shape.”

I’m still ambitious. I am still looking for a way to “be somebody” in the world, perhaps now more than ever. But the somebody I want to be today is “a gardener.”  This is my ambition now, this is my intent. This is the way I want to be in the world, and what it means to be this way in the world is what I want to understand.

Who would true valour see
Let him come hither.
One here will constant be
Come wind, come weather.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make her once relent
Her last avowed intent,
To be a gardener.

I’ve been out of touch for a while, quite a while. My constancy has been sorely tried by the discouragement of a serious drought. I have never seen my garden so dry. This season I chose to enhance my garden with several additional native shrubs and perennials. New plantings need water. Old plantings need water. Newly pruned trees and shrubs need water. Everything needs water. I have been watering. It trust it is “true valour” made visible.

This morning there is a drizzle. I am not turning off the hose, but I am taking it as a sign that I can write to you again. It is good to be in touch.

If you aren’t already a subscriber, I’d be honored to have you as a reader. You can sign up here.http://perennialwisdom.net.

March 29, 2022

Blue Spruces

I’m waffling on the spruces. For months, I refused to return the calls from Joe at Davey to renew my contract for spraying the spruces for the rhizosphaera needle cast fungus disease. After all, I have taken the pledge to keep the lawn herbicide and pesticide free. How could I let a fungicide be sprayed on my spruces?

Then Ben stopped by. I showed him the spruces, told him how poorly I thought they were doing and that I was even thinking of taking them down,they looked so scraggly. Ben said my spruces looked good compared to most he has seen.

“One more season of spraying,” he told me, “and they will look great again.”

I went inside and called Joe. “Sign me up,” I told him, “I am going to save them”

Then I decided to look up the product that Davey has been using on the spruces. It was not that easy to figure out. In my files from Davey I have sheets on two different products. Koicide 3000 is a copper fungicide made by Certis Inc, which is a subsidiary of Mitsui & Co. CuPRO 5000 is also

a copper fungicide made by SePRO, whose home base is Carmel, Indiana, the town where my high school boyfriend now lives to whom I send cards and letters.

I assume that these are the two products used by Davey in treating the trees, but I cannot not be sure. Nowhere does the bill actually say what was used. I know enough to know that copper hydroxide is far less toxic than many products previously used in agriculture and landscape plantings. But that doesn’t mean that these sprays are not harmful.

Both products are registered with the EPA, but I suspect this doesn’t mean much. Both products are touted as environmentally safe, but I realize that such language in a product description most likely means just that it is EPA approved. After all, if these sprays are so safe, why does Davey leave little yellow signs all over my property after an application warning people to stay away? And why do the information sheets carry the warning, in large capital letters, “DANGER/PELIGRO”? If the product is potentially harmful to humans and domestic animals, what about the birds and bees?

Puzzling over all of this, I called Joe and cancelled once again.

“I am going to let them go,” I told him. “I have taken a vow to go pesticide free.”

“Your decision,” he said, “but honestly it’s a shame.”

Recently, however, I was chatting with a fellow master gardener. We got to talking about spruces and the problem of the fungus. She told me that she sprayed her trees every year. I asked who did the work.

“Peter of Cedar Tree Properties,” she replied.

Peter has been doing organic lawn care for me for years. I trust Peter to care about the bigger picture and I trust him to tell me the truth about the product he uses. I called him immediately, he came, looked at the spruces, declared them well worth saving and has promised to send me a quote for the cost. Meanwhile, I am writing to him to find out exactly what product he uses and exactly what environmental concerns exist for this product. But I am definitely tempted to let Peter continue to save my spruces.

I planted four of these spruces, the Picea pungens ‘Kosteri,’ in June of the first summer I lived at Columbine Drive. I had spent the months since moving in pondering the question of what tree would make the best boundary between my neighbor’s yard and my own and what tree would make the best backdrop for my future garden.

I settled on the blue spruce. I have always loved blue; I have always loved spruces; they offered four-season interest; they would do the job of enclosing and blocking in winter as well as in summer. Besides, in my then quite limited horticultural knowledge, the blue spruce was the ultimate specimen tree, highly desirable, even coveted. And no one else in the neighborhood had one yet.

I hired my neighbor, who was also a landscape designer, to purchase and plant the trees. We fought, bitterly, over the number and spacing. I insisted I needed only four and that they be planted far enough apart so that their bottom branches would just touch at maturity. Pat insisted that I would not be happy with so much space between the trees as they were growing. He wanted to plant five and put them close together. I declared, rather pompously, that I was planting for the seventh generation, not for the current moment. Pat capitulated under the weight of my self-importance and set four in as I had marked.

Two years after planting the ‘Kosteri,’ I discovered an even bluer blue spruce than the ones along the back border.

“What is this?” I asked Randy, my favorite nurseryman at Faddegons, of the tiny 3’ wonder I held in my hand, a bit misshapen but covered with steely blue needles.

“It’s a Picea pungens ‘Hoopsi,’” he answered. “It’s got a much sharper color than the ‘Kosteri’. It’s won a lot of awards.”

“I have to have it,” I said. I bought it, brought it home, and planted it myself in a prominent spot along the side of my house, perfect for an even more special specimen tree.

A month later Pat came by with a 9’ ‘Hoopsi.’

“Look what I have for you,” he said. “It’s a proper version of that squirt you put in your lawn.”

Of course, it was three times the cost, but I couldn’t resist. It was three times the size, already most impressive. I tossed the seventh generation out the window and went for immediate gratification. Pat moved the wee tree to a different spot farther down the side yard and set his beauty in my prime location. Today, some twenty-two years later, the two trees are the same size, though I must admit that Pat’s tree has the perfect shape he noted as a selling point. I have actually had people offer to buy it.

The ‘Hoopsi’ have survived the fungus far better than the ‘Kosteri.’ Still, if I do not treat, I will most likely lose them too. Can I bear it?

Several years ago, in a freak tornado, I lost my ‘Cleveland Select’ Callery pear, the first one I planted, the one with the brandy snifter shape and the glorious fall foliage, the one that gave me shade in the summer and interest in the winter. As I turned my downed tree into stacks of branches and chunks of wood to place by the road for the town to come and take and turn into chips that I could use to make my paths, I swore that I would leave Columbine Drive if anything ever happened to my spruces. I was angry at whatever force had taken down my beloved tree, and in the usual absurdities of people under emotional stress I thought I could hurt that force by making such a promise.

I have grown past that absurdity. I don’t’ think I would have to leave Columbine Drive if I let my spruces go. Indeed I think I would enjoy making in their place a hedgerow of native plants that would support pollinators and caterpillars.

But here’s the real rub. Some ten years after planting the ‘Kosteri’ I went to a performance at Tanglewood of Schubert’s 9^th symphony. I have not had many visions in my lifetime, but I had one that night. At one point in the music, I saw my spruces dancing. They took hold of each other’s hands, those lower now-touching branches, and swayed gracefully forward and back, forward and back, bowing down and lifting up, in time to the music. I swear I heard them saying ‘Thank you.’

I feel I have a contract with my spruces. I fought to get them planted properly, I have fought to keep them alive, I have promised to move if they die, Ibelieve they have thanked me for planting them. And the ‘Hoopsi’ are still gorgeous.

But I have also taken a pledge to go pesticide and herbicide free. I don’t know what to do.

Any thoughts?

Kosteri, planted by Pat, 1998